The laptop screen was the only light in the room — that particular blue-white glow that exists nowhere else in nature, too cold for candlelight, too sharp for moonlight, the specific color of 3 AM and bad decisions and people who had stopped caring about their sleep schedule.
It fell across Cael’s face and caught the black hair hanging into his left eye, turning the edges of it faintly blue.
He pushed it back with his left hand, an old habit from when his hair was short enough that it never needed pushing.
Carried forward because habits don’t know when they’ve become pointless.
On screen, Robb Stark was riding north.
Cael Drake was seventeen and looked like a rough draft of himself.
He’d been broad-shouldered once — not bulky, but the lean, coiled strength of a sprinter, built over years of 5 AM track sessions and shin splints and running the same four hundred meters until the curve felt like something his body knew better than language.
His coaches called it a natural gift.
He’d always privately disagreed; the gift was real, but it had been earned, in increments too small and painful to look like talent from outside.
He’d known the difference.
He’d been proud of knowing it.
That boy was mostly gone.
His arms had grown stronger — the wheelchair made different demands than the track ever had — but his legs had thinned to something that looked borrowed, something that lay too still under blankets and didn’t shift the way living legs did.
He had a soft spot for Bran Stark that he didn’t examine too closely.
Easy to understand why — boy falls from a tower, loses his legs, keeps going — and the recognition sat uncomfortably in Cael’s chest, like a word in a language he didn’t know he knew.
He didn’t want to be Bran.
Had never wanted to be Bran.
He wanted to be Robb.
Eighteen years old, leading armies twice his size through sheer force of something that wasn’t strategy and wasn’t luck.
Every battle Robb won was a battle he had no business winning, and watching him move across the screen, Cael felt the ghost of a very specific feeling — two hundred meters left, lungs on fire, the shift from effort into something that didn’t have a clean name.
He’d found that feeling three times, in real races, and crossed the line first knowing — not arrogantly, just factually — that he was going somewhere.
His coach had said Olympic qualifying was realistic within two years.
His coach had been conservative.
That was seven months and one truck and ninety-three hospital days ago.
He turned the volume up and let himself feel the complicated grief of watching someone do the thing he’d stopped believing he could do.
Outside, it had been raining since midnight — the percussion of water on the fire escape three floors up, a gutter somewhere overflowing, tires on wet asphalt fading down streets Cael hadn’t been on in three months.
The window was fogged at the lower corner, streetlight smearing orange through the glass.
He was on hour six of the rewatch, and somewhere around hour four the active engagement had gone passive — less like watching weather, more like being inside it.
He wasn’t predicting anymore.
He was just there, in the cold, watching a young king make decisions that were brilliant and wrong at once because the world wouldn’t honor the brilliance.
The clock in the corner of the screen read 6:04 AM.
The number sat in his chest a moment before he understood why.
Rayen hadn’t called.
Not a missed call buried somewhere — nothing.
No notification at all.
Rayen called every night.
Sometimes barely thirty seconds — ate?
yes, whether or not it was true, okay, sleep, I’ll be late — but always.
Ninety-three nights, always.
Cael dialed.
The subscriber you are calling is currently unavailable—
He hung up.
Dialed again.
Same flat, measured voice.
His thumb found Joey’s contact instead.
Four rings.
“Cael.
Hey.
Everything okay?”
“Is Rayen with you?”
“Yeah — yeah, he’s fine.” A door closing somewhere, a quieter space.
“Double shift, manager called in sick.
His phone died around midnight, couldn’t charge it till the break room opened.
He tried to get me to call you, but my line was tied up — sorry.”
Cael closed his eyes and felt the forty minutes of quietly constructed panic come apart, reluctant the way things are when they’ve been clenched a long time.
“Tell him to call.
Whenever.
Doesn’t matter the time.”
“Will do.
Get some sleep, man.”
“I’m fine.”
He sat with the phone in his lap and breathed — four counts in, slow out, the way physio had taught him.
His thumb found the old scar on his forearm without him deciding to move it.
Rayen is fine.
Rayen is always fine.
He let himself imagine, briefly and without indulgence, what Rayen’s life looked like without this — actual sleep, no more doubles, calls returned to friends he’d stopped calling back.
He turned the thought over carefully, the way you handle something that might cut, and then put it down.
He survived before I was born.
He survived our parents.
He’ll be okay.
It wasn’t comfort, exactly.
It was colder than comfort.
But it held, and his breathing evened out, and he unpaused the episode.
By six-thirty the sky was doing something worth seeing — the streetlight orange giving way to a pre-dawn gray with warmth underneath it, gold trying to happen at the horizon.
Cael kept glancing at the window instead of the screen, greedy for daylight after three months of mostly not having any.
He reached to angle the laptop toward it.
Wanted real light for the Red Wedding, which was maybe a strange preference, but here they were.
His hand slipped.
A small thing — his center of gravity was still something his body miscalculated sometimes, math it had rewritten without consulting him.
The wheel caught the rug, the shift was minor, his legs offered nothing, and the floor came up and met him.
He lay on the laminate and looked at the ceiling.
He’d gotten good at the thirty seconds afterward — not at avoiding the fall, just at the deliberate pause before deciding what came next.
Four minutes, hands flat on the cold floor, arms taking all of it, and he was back up.
Getting faster.
He didn’t bother with the chair.
Sat on the floor instead, back against the wall beneath the open window, laptop angled beside him, legs straight and parallel and too still.
He’d stopped filing things under dignity around month two.
He pressed play.
The Frey wedding started its terrible music.
The morning air came through the window above him — cool, clean, sharp with rain — and something about it was wrong before he understood it was wrong.
The rain sound thinned out first, the gutter-rush and fire-escape percussion fading like someone turning a dial.
Then the orange streetlight smear on the floor went strange at the edges, bending the way light bends through water, though nothing was between him and the window.
His ears popped, once, sharply, the way they did on a plane losing altitude.
The laptop’s blue glow guttered, as if the screen had gone somewhere else without the rest of the room agreeing to follow.
He had time to think that’s not—
Then the floor wasn’t laminate anymore.
Cold.
Different.
Cael opened his eyes and the ceiling was gone.
Above him: a vast pale gray sky, stars still clinging to its western edge where night hadn’t finished losing.
Below him: snow.
It took a long moment — the kind where the mind receives information and can’t find a category for it — before he pushed himself up onto his palms, the same motion as twenty minutes ago on his kitchen floor, and looked out at a snowfield running to a treeline of black-limbed trees standing close and patient in the half-dark.
No city.
No traffic, no gutters, no one else alive that he could hear.
Just wind, the deep creak of old wood somewhere, and his own breath fogging in front of him before the cold took it.
His pajamas — thin gray cotton, adequate for a June apartment, useless here — were already soaked through from the snow beneath him.
He looked at his legs.
Pressed a palm hard against his thigh.
Tried, with the same full effort he tried every single morning and had never once seen produce a result, to move his toes.
Nothing.
The same nothing as always.
Just relocated.
Transmigration, some calm, over-read part of his brain offered, in the tone of someone recognizing a genre rather than living a crisis.
“Status,” he said, to nobody.
His voice sounded strange out here — the snow ate it the way it ate everything.
“System window.
Inventory.
Awakening—” He ran through every phrase he half-remembered from manhwa read during hospital nights when sleep wouldn’t come.
Nothing answered.
No blue box, no golden light, no voice waiting at the edge of his attention.
Just snow, and trees, and a sky that didn’t care either way.
He lay back because sitting up unsupported was work, and he had no sleep and no adrenaline left to spend on it, and he stared at the gray and thought, with flat, arithmetic certainty: I am going to die here.
Not dramatically.
The math was simple — wet cotton, no shelter, no fire, half his body numb to start with, temperature already past what his depleted frame could absorb.
An hour, maybe less.
He thought about Rayen finishing a double shift, calling and getting nothing, calling again, calling Joey, going home to an open window and a laptop frozen on the Twins right before everything ended, standing in the doorway trying to make sense of a room that didn’t make sense anymore.
He’ll look for me.
He’ll look for a long time.
That’s who he is.
His throat closed.
He let it hurt and didn’t look away from it.
He’ll be okay.
He was okay before.
He’ll find a way again.
He held the cold solidity of that the way he’d held it forty minutes and one entire world ago.
A sound.
Small.
Precise.
The specific snap of a dry twig under deliberate weight — not wind, not an animal’s carelessness, but the placed step of something that already knew exactly where it was going.
Everything in Cael went still.
Then: boots compressing packed snow, unhurried, the pace of someone who had already spotted him and felt no need to rush.
The whisper of a heavy cloak through low branches.
His hands closed into fists.
He could not run.
Could not stand.
Could not put one inch between himself and whatever was walking out of that treeline, and some old, buried part of him — the part that used to stand on a starting line and refuse to be afraid of anything with a stopwatch — noted the fact with something almost like contempt.
He did not look away.
The footsteps slowed.
Stopped.
The trees parted.
The man who stepped out was not monstrous.
That registered first, and it mattered.
Tall — six-two at least, straight-backed, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone for whom hard terrain and uncertain mornings were a professional routine.
His cloak was black, heavy, years of treated wool and leather worn down to something closer to a second skin, patched at the left shoulder with slightly different material, pinned at the collar with a plain iron clasp.
Black leather over black wool beneath it, all of it gone soft with use.
A long knife at his belt, the bone handle smoothed by handling.
A sword across his back, its grip worn pale at the contact points.
His face was weathered the way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with weather and a life that hadn’t been gentle — maybe thirty-four, a jaw mostly hidden under a beard that was more neglect than intention, gray threading through the dark of it.
A two-inch scar along his jawline, old and white.
Pale eyes — gray, or pale blue reading as gray in this light — moving across Cael with the unhurried assessment of a man who had learned the world occasionally produced things that didn’t fit a category, and that the correct response to that was observation, not panic.
They stopped on the pajamas.
He crouched, weight on his heels, forearms on his knees, and reached out to rub the fabric of Cael’s sleeve between two fingers.
His eyes came back up to Cael’s face.
Night’s Watch.
Which means the Wall.
Which means the North, and winter, and the whole vast, merciless machinery of the worst possible place I could have landed.
No legs.
No system.
No cheat.
No golden finger.
In Westeros.
“Fuck,” Cael said.
The man in black said nothing.
He was still turning the fabric between his fingers, studying the impossibly uniform stitching, the weave that didn’t belong to anything he’d ever seen, with the look of a man quietly recalculating.
Light was starting somewhere past the trees — gray, indifferent, offering nothing.
Cael looked up into the pale, watchful eyes of a stranger and felt his mind do the thing it used to do in the last hundred meters: go quiet, go precise, find the one useful thread and pull it.
He’s looking at that fabric like it’s worth something.
He’s never touched anything like it.
To him, this looks expensive.
This looks like it belongs to someone who matters.
Use that.
Use everything you have, because everything you have is a story.
He met the man’s eyes, kept his voice steadier than he had any right to, and said:
“My family trades out of Qarth.
That weave — you won’t find it anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms.” He held the stare.
“And you won’t find their reward if I die in this snow.”
The pale eyes didn’t move.
Wind dragged through the trees and pushed Cael’s hair across his forehead, and this time he let it stay there, because his hands were fists and they were staying that way.
A long silence.
“What reward,” the man said.
Cael Drake — who had no money, no power, no use of his legs, no system, nothing in this world but a knowledge of its story that nobody else alive possessed, and a willingness to lie about all of it without blinking — took a breath.
The first lie he told in Westeros would decide whether he saw the sun come up.
He started talking.